I quite liked the first Fantastic Beasts movie. I liked Eddie Redmayne's performance of Newt Scamander as a very non-traditionally heroic protagonist; I liked the imagination of the visuals; I liked the core cast; I liked the action. Most of that is still here in the sequel, but the problem is: it comes in much, much smaller doses.

By that I mean that Clams of Grandlewoo takes the core cast from the first film (the four main cast members plus the two antagonists) and then adds Newt's brother, Newt's brother's fiance, Newt's brother's fiance's secret half-brother, Young Albus Dumbledore, and Snake Lady, who all get a lot of screen time, and then on top of that it also gives Grooblewood a couple of evil accomplices who do things, and also there's Newt's brother's boss (who really doesn't like Young Dumbledore) and Nicolas Flamel shows up and... you're starting to see the problem already, aren't you?

Here's the truth: JK Rowling's strengths as a writer are inventive and fun (albeit shallow) worldbuilding and clever dialogue. Her primary weakness as a writer is that she never knows when to stop putting stuff in, which is why from book four of Harry Potter onwards, the books got ridiculously long and indulgent, because she didn't have an editor telling her "no, you don't need this" because now she was a multisquillionaire and nobody could really do that to her any more. The reason the Harry Potter movies worked so well is because the screenwriters adapting her books were able to mercilessly cut out everything from the books that wasn't necessary for a good story.

But now JK Rowling herself is the primary screenwriter for the Fantastic Beasts movies and we're back to square one. So much about this movie is not necessary. Nobody asked for a long dramatic arc for Newt's brother's fiance or a needless love triangle between her, Newt and Newt's brother, but man do you get one, and it drags the movie down like a fucking anchor. (Nothing like a five-minute flashback scene to kill a movie's momentum dead.) Nobody needed Newt's brother's fiance's history to be a central plot point either, but it is. Nobody needed all the time spent on establishing the fact that Young Dumbledore can't fight Grumblewhip because they used to be gay lovers (not that this is ever said aloud, of course, because Rowling is really a very cowardly writer) and they made an unbreakable magic pact with blood and such; certainly nobody needed that to be a major plot reveal near the end of the film when A) it was bloody obvious and B) the movie has Young Dumbledore refuse to explain this to the magic cops who are mad at him for no good reason whatsoever. Nobody needed Nicolas Flamel to be in this movie because he literally does nothing at all.

Tack on some ludicrous character choices ("let's turn Queenie evil and align the woman in love with a Muggle with the evil wizard who wants to kill all Muggles because that makes so much fucking sense") and the stinking, movie-ruining presence of Johnny Depp, who does not need to be in this movie because his character is literally a shapeshifter, and what you have here is a colossal turd of a film that literally crowds out everything good about the first one: Newt gets less time overall in what is supposed to be his bloody story, Tina gets far less time (Katherine Waterston deserved better), Jacob gets less time and less opportunity to interact with Newt (the best bit of the first film, really), and there are fewer Fantastic Beasts doing fantastic things.

At times it can get just a little sermon-y when one character is explaining to another the nature of, say, the socioeconomic trap of white supremacy that has shoved black people in the poor neighborhood into crime. And the ending is a little too pat and wraps up too many story threads, which normally I like in a flick but most movies aren't about difficult-to-fix social phenomena, so it doesn't really feel germane here.

All of that said: it has excellent performances across the board, but particularly some powerhouse wrecking-ball ones from Amandla Stenberg and Russell Hornsby (who really, really deserves a Best Supporting Actor nod this year at some awards ceremony at least). KJ Apa never stops feeling like Archie Andrews (Non-Redhead Edition), though. And it matters, because it's about something awful and it doesn't flinch from the awfulness of what it is about. The shooting scene in particular is remarkable for that.

Overlord is basically about as good as it can be, considering it is a movie about Allied soldiers fighting zombies on D-Day, which is a silly B-movie concept that the movie makes work far better than it has any right to do.

It's well-shot, has good dialogue and great performances (everybody who writes about this movie keeps talking about how Wyatt Russell is seriously a chip off his father Kurt's block, and at first it doesn't quite fit and then he starts talking with a more gravelly voice as his character gets more into the shit and that's when you go oh yeah, he really is his father's son, that's crazy), it gets the little details that it needs to get right, and crucially, it hews to its own internal logic and is tonally consistent throughout.

It just does what it wants to do exceptionally well for 110 minutes. Maybe it runs a little long, but only a little.

What's truly remarkable about Das Boot is that the three-and-a-half-hour director's cut of the film (which is the only cut of the film, forget the theatrical cut entirely) doesn't feel like three and a half hours at all. With the exception of the introduction and the later banquet scene aboard the Weser (which is there as a timely contrast between stuffed suits who talk about war versus soldiers who actually have to fight, and necessary), this entire thing is taut as a wire for three hours and change.

It never stops being tense, because the claustrophobic interior of the submarine never lets it be anything but tense; even when in comparative downtime outside of combat, when the sailors are shit-talking each other or complaining about the food or how their soccer team is doing, there is the omnipresent feeling that Wolfgang Petersen never lets go away of the water could come rushing in at any moment. Which is why it's a masterpiece.

I know Lothar-Günther Buchheim, the author of the original (deeply antiwar) novel, felt that the original theatrical cut demeaned his work, but the director's cut restores a lot of the antiwar sentiment in the book. (There's a 4.5-hour "tv miniseries" cut existent, but I've never seen it, and that is reputedly even more anti-war in its sentiments; it seems the more you cut out of the story the more jingoistic it gets. There's a moral there.)

Apparently there was a longer cut which premiered at TIFF which was much worse-paced than this, which is weird because this new, "better" cut still feels uneven and weird in how it advances its story.

Anyway, it's fine: shot gorgeously, the battle scenes are vicious, the dialogue is naturalistic but also mostly entertaining as needed, Chris Pine is good, Florence Pugh is great, Aaron Taylor-Johnson is believably psychotic, Stephen Dillane makes Edward I almost sympathetic, and Billy Howle is a good enough villain, and this looks like how medieval Scotland should look (unlike Braveheart, which is wildly anachronistic).

All of these things will almost get you past how the story just doesn't feel connected to anything. Almost.

I would call this "an inoffensive piece of sci-fi" but the bit where it's about a black kid who uses a magic gun to solve problems definitely makes it at least a touch problematic, even if I wouldn't go so far as to call it straight-up offensive per se. Just one of those times where you're watching the movie and you're all "...man, they use the magic gun a whole lot to solve their problems with crimes" and it's clear the writers didn't really think that aspect of the story through all the way.

This is also one of those movies where it's gonna sink or swim on its core relationship between the two brothers (Myles Truitt and Jack Reynor, who is the poor man's Chris Pratt), and I mostly go with "swim" except at the end, the climax isn't really about their relationship, it's about a suddenly-revealed alternate dimension where Michael B. Jordan shoots magic guns, and that kind of sucks.

Beyond that: good performances in stock character roles from Dennis Quaid, Zoe Kravitz and especially James Franco, who should always just play villains from now on because he's so much better at playing villains than anything else. The effects are decent and the action serviceable. But this really does top out at "inoffensive."

What really sticks with me is that only after it is finished do you realize how ambiguous it really is, because while you're in the moment, watching it, you're stuck inside Jong-Su's field of perception for practically the entire movie. (There's maybe two minutes of the movie that aren't shot from his perspective, if that, and those two minutes immediately reframe one of the characters ever so slightly.)

Like, the central question of "is Ben a serial killer who murdered Haemi" is compelling and the moment you step away from watching the film, you realize all of the clues are so ambiguous. Ben got a cat, and when Jong-Su calls out Haemi's cat's name, the cat comes to him. (Because that, of course, is a thing cats do: they come to strangers when called by their name.) Ben has Haemi's old watch in his bathroom drawer. (Because there's no way she forgot it there, because the watch isn't really that important to her, so Ben tossed it in his junk drawer.) Ben talks about burning down greenhouses for fun. (While he is high, and also, maybe he just likes fucking with people.) It's all perspective-based, and that's the triumph of the movie: it puts you so unsettlingly inside Jong-Su's head, and lets you forget how he's completely obsessed with this girl but also unable to admit it (masturbating in her empty apartment, uh huh, totally normal, also really cool when you called her a whore, you gater nebbish you), and it's completely reasonable to think, after the fact, "maybe he just invented this theory out of whole cloth."

But it's also not unreasonable. Steven Yeun's performance is particularly important in this regard, because Ben is... man, when you're watching him you know this man is stone cold evil, straight up, one of the great villain performances of our age. Except for those aforementioned two minutes, where he is... much less that. And there's all the little things that don't make sense in context by themselves about her disappearance.

Anyway, my point is: this is a movie about almost totally being inside somebody's head, and how it is not a pleasant place to be. Gorgeously shot, gorgeously scored. One of the year's best.

I always like to look at other reviews on Letterboxd before I write my reviews, and this one gets a whole lot of "I am ashamed that I laughed at this" two-star reviews, and all you people can get over yourselves. Because this movie is really very funny, and while the central premise is lowbrow and stupid (a kid accidentally cuts off his own dick, and his friends have to go through misadventures to get his dick back to him so it can be surgically re-attached), the execution of that premise is honestly pretty smart.

Comparisons to Blockers are probably inevitable because Geraldine Viswanathan stars in both movies (she plays John Cena's daughter in Blockers) and because she is really, really good at this type of comedy: she can deliver a line like "is that you? Are you the Fuck King?" and it works and it's funny and it's completely believable. She's grounded and natural and makes the entire movie better. None of the other performances are bad, but she's a cut above the rest of them.

It's not as good as Blockers is, to be sure - sometimes the comedy gets a little frantic and desperate and forced (particularly during one of the hospital sequences), there's a secondary subplot about two characters hooking up that feels a little obligatory, and Blockers just felt more inspired and original because it put its female characters forward as the primary face of the movie where this one clearly has a male lead protagonist (who is fine, don't get me wrong).

But it's still pretty good. I laughed a lot at it, because good dick jokes are funny, and this movie has a lot of good dick jokes in it.

It's a good movie. Too long, maybe (I was really feeling it by the two hour mark), and you just sort of know Bradley Cooper is the sort of person who really really wanted to play an old-school cowboy country-rocker who's authentic, maaaaaaaan - but he acts the shit out of it, and Gaga is great, and the songs are good, and his direction is intimate as hell and gorgeously lit.

All of that said: I would have liked it so much more if Ally had gotten a character arc of her own rather than just being reactive to everything Jackson was going through. The fact that she doesn't have one doesn't make this a bad film, mind you, because it's not. But it does make it distinctly less great than I think it could have been.

ARQ has its high points and its not-so-high points. Certainly, as a low-budget sci-fi thriller, it makes the most of a very small FX budget (which basically boils down to a precious few superimposed hologram effects and a few basic pulls out of Adobe AfterEffects, plus a couple of futury-looking plasticky bits intended to be Space Money or something, and one impressive CGI monster right at the very end, plus a few squibs for gunshots).

And it's got a clever, intricate plot, which rewards the sort of movie viewer who's always hoping for a smart villain. ARQ has one of the smartest movie villains I've ever seen - one of the reasons the movie is so compelling is because he is constantly two steps ahead of the heroes, figuring out the twists and turns of this "Groundhog Day, but for future murdering" landscape before they do, and Shaun Benson has the best performance in the entire movie to boot.

Unfortunately, everybody else in the movie is just sort of going with the "grit your teeth as much as possible and let it convey all emotions" school of acting, which makes a film that should have been so much more enjoyable end up feeling kind of like a chore at times. Which is a pity.

I have never actually finished watching this movie all the way through, despite numerous attempts to do so, and I am happy I finally did because so much of the joy of this film is in that triumphant, crazed, inspired ending - Peter O'Toole swinging down from the balcony like a madman and the crowd cheering him on. It makes you appreciate all the groundwork the film laid to get to that point, making Rich Swann such a depressive, self-hating hedonist and layering on how little real connection he has in his life, precisely because of his fame preventing him from finding it - all while not letting go of the fact that Swann is, in many ways, kind of a piece of shit. But he's an understandable piece of shit, and that makes all the difference.

Intense and gripping, but also oddly disconnected; First Man is a biopic where the primary subject remains resolutely non-disclosive. Neil Armstrong was a man who went through life holding his cards close to his chest and Ryan Gosling plays him that way, only letting the tinest amounts of sadness, fear, frustration and ambition show, and it's a fascinating, probably-pretty-accurate choice. It could read to some as boring (and sometimes it is a little boring, let's be honest) but mostly it feels a bit like an application of the Kuleshov effect as applied to acting choices for an entire film.

Everything else is superlative. The action sequences are thrilling and/or terrifying, Claire Foy is absolutely terrific (she really nails someone who has made a difficult choice with their life but who is sticking with it), Jason Clarke and Corey Stoll and Kyle Chandler are all superb in their supporting roles, Patrick Fugit shows up briefly (!), and the space sequences are majestic and intimidating while the Earth sequences feel like a collection of old Polaroids (which I mean as the highest compliment). Damien Chazelle did really good work here.

Good performances all around and tremendously striking cinematography from Seamus McGarvey can't really disguise for me the fact that none of the characters really have character arcs worth mentioning, that the plot barely exists as anything more than a collection of events, that there isn't really a story worth mentioning either (an eleventh-hour attempt to try to parallelize one character with a MacGuffin is painfully transparent), and that the numerous flashbacks which try to obscure the lack of plot or story aren't really very interesting and generally only impede the narrative flow of the film anyway.

I mean, why exactly am I supposed to care, two hours into this movie, about the backstory of Lewis Pullman's bellhop, who until this point has been treated as mostly a cipher? And if your answer is "a ha, Drew Goddard is trying to make a point," that's firmly in head-wedged-up-own-ass territory for me. Good noir is about the art of construction, of creating a fiendish little Chinese puzzlebox of a story constructed of complex characters and odd coincidences which aren't coincidences and making sure all of your thematic journeys have a uniform mesh to them so they aren't falling over one another. Bad Times at the El Royale has precisely none of that, and far, far too much that's just extraneous fluff.

Hugely disappointing, especially after how much I enjoyed Cabin In The Woods, which did everything right this one does not.

A wonderfully sweet movie, small in scope and large in ambition, Hearts Beat Loud is the sort of movie that lets characters talk about how great Animal Collective are, and yes, that's a very specific type of movie, the type of movie that allows its characters enthusiasm about art, both the creation and appreciation thereof. (I am generally easy prey for these sorts of movies, be forewarned.)

Really, the only flaw with this movie is that it introduces a major plot shift/climax point three minutes before the movie ends, and then resolves that mess by simply flashing forward to the resolution. It feels like the movie is missing one crucial scene, which is why I have it at five stars rather than four.

But other than that, it's a wee gem of a thing. Nick Offerman is exactly as good as you would expect him to be, Kiersey Clemons is a radiant screen presence who deserves to be in all the movies, and when your supporting cast is Toni Collette, Ted Danson and Blythe Danner you are in seriously good hands. The small stakes are never treated with anything more or less than the exact level of seriousness that is proper. And the music is ridiculously good. This one is worth seeking out.

I kind of think the blackmail plot maybe detracts a little from the overall story arc of the film a bit (all of the best scenes in the movie are the ones... not about that) but not tremendously so.

That's really all I got. This is a lovely film, and it wasn't made for me, and that's fine, because it makes other people happy and brave, and that's good, and to those people I hope my nitpicking about the story construction doesn't detract from your experience.

(wait, Greg Berlanti directed this? how did he find the time? he has like four billion DC Comics teevee shows to make)

Oddly, the word that keeps coming to me when I want to describe this movie is "efficient," which is not a word I associate with costume dramas. At an hour forty-seven, this thing shuffles around ten characters with major plot contributions plus a bunch of supporting cast and not a one of them feels rushed or forced - or ignored or given short shrift, on the other end of that spectrum.

Everything else about the movie you've already read, probably a bunch of stuff about Nigel Hawthorne's crowning achievement and the like. But that efficiency is what really gets me.

I wanted to like this so much more than I did, but: it's a Hallmark card stretched into a movie, and more often than not it's not a really good Hallmark card.

When it's strong, it's because of the relationships between Storm Reid, Deric McCabe, Chris Pine and Gugu Mbatha-Raw, whose family dynamics are incredibly strong and believable. When the movie is about them, it's pretty great, which is why the story starts strong and finishes so strongly that it sort of makes up for the all the time you spend getting to it.

Everything else is some degree of bad. Oprah Winfrey. Reese Witherspoon and Mindy Kaling are all bad in this, and I like all three of them. Zach Galifianakis feels terribly miscast. Levi Miller feels almost completely unneeded (except to say the important thing, which is that Storm Reid is a beautiful young person). The lush otherworldly sequences feel belabored and overlong.

Such a disappointment, and yet, I'm glad it was made - Hollywood needs to give the Ava Duvernays (and lots of other female directors who haven't gotten accolades) chances like this one.

Letterboxd reviews of this keep comparing this to L. A. Confidential, which is quite understandable: two noir mysteries set in 1940s Los Angeles, there's murders and they're seamy and violent, and the protagonist is a tough man, not a paladin but He's Got A Code, you know, that sort of thing.

But this isn't a knockoff of Confidential, not by any means - and while it isn't as ambitious as Confidential is (and has Tak Fujimoto's workmanlike, unshowy visuals rather than Dante Spinotti's lush palette of shadows), it has its own distinct low-key excellence: a good old fashioned mucky murder mystery, but a distinctly Black one, grounded in the Black experience of the 1940s and 50s - which sounds precious to write out, but non-modern Black film experiences that aren't about the civil rights struggle in the 1960s are rare as hell and thus it's always important to appreciate the great ones when they come along. (See also: Posse. This is, however, much better than Posse.)

Despite some story problems (the movie's plot is sometimes a bit confusing) It's really a damn shame we only ever got one of these. Denzel was born to be a hard-bitten PI with a heart of gold, and Don Cheadle as his psycho best bud is great.

A mumblecore piece of garbage horror by Nick Gillespie, who is the protege of Ben Wheatley (who isn't any good at telling a compelling story either, but at least can make it look pretty, and Gillespie can't really even manage that), that goes nowhere, isn't scary, barely bothers to explain anything, and ends with a "it was the GOVERNMENT!" twist that barely qualifies as a twist because by the time you get to the end you'll be thinking "either it's hell or it's a government experiment" because nothing else really fits and neither answer is creative or interesting, much like how this film is not.

Sausage Party is often derisively described by many critics on this site as being a mostly unfunny comedy that, once you get past the talking food gimmick, is mostly dick and sex jokes stapled onto a paper-thin plot about religious acceptance conflicting with atheism, but this is unfair: it is also frequently racist!

I laughed a lot at this, a lot, and that's great when you're watching a comedy but really great, these days, when you're watching a Hollywood sex comedy. Like, when was the last good major studio sex comedy? The 40-Year-Old Virgin, maybe? And that's stretching the definition.

It's not entirely even, some gags just go on way too long (Gary Cole and Gina Gershon's sex life is... not that funny) and too many characters in the film explain that the entire premise is really forced, which - well, yes, it is, that's why it's a comedy, but having characters complain at me about a film's premise is always annoying. But everybody's funny, the girls playing the girls are uniformly excellent, and John Cena butt-chugs a 40, so on the whole it's a solid thumbs up.

It's fine. It's fine. But it's not about anything more than its plot. No character in it really has much of an arc - Mr. Incredible comes closest, but his arc gets resolved maybe halfway through the movie and then he's just punching things - and there's no real guiding moral for the entire film. All plot, no story.

Like, The Incredibles does get shit on by people who think it's Objectivist-leaning (it really isn't - Brad Bird made his personal code clear in Tomorrowland and he's anti-selfish to say the least) but at least it's about something, and that informs the film and makes it great (if controversial). This one is empty calories. Entertaining empty calories to be sure! But empty nonetheless.

It's definitely about ten minutes too long for what it is, and those ten minutes make it feel like two hours, and that's a problem. Some of its running gags, like Jeremy Renner's internal narration whenever the tagging gets going or Isla Fisher's aggressive streak, definitely get overused and feel stale by the end. The romantic competition subplot with Rashida Jones takes up too much time and never gets truly resolved in a satisfactory way; ditto Jake Johnson's terrible life character note, which feels like it wants some resolution but never gets it. And the twist feels a little overwrought for the rest of the movie, and comes too late in the story to really land its full impact.

All of that said, though: this is an amiable sort of movie with a bunch of enjoyable comedic performances (Hannibal Buress is the best but they're all pretty good) about how play makes us better people, which is a rare moral in Hollywood nowadays (and always has been, I think). And it has a lot of really good physical comedy, which a lot of critics tend to dismiss because slapstick is considered a crude, low form of humour, but that doesn't mean it's easy to do it well.

The thing about Tom Cruise which people forget - in between all the "Tom Cruise will die making Mission Impossible films" hoopla and "he's a Scientologist and evil" criticism - is that he's honestly a pretty good actor, especially when he plays to his great strength, which are playing people who are a bit off-kilter - not a lot, just a bit. The ones who mostly have it under control, but sometimes it leaks out. I know this just sounds like a description of Tom Cruise, of course, but it's not just a matter of playing himself; he finds the character and becomes it, in his Tom Cruisey way.

American Made gets points for being incredibly cynical, but if anything it fails to be cynical enough. The real Barry Seal (whose life was mostly not like this movie) was by all accounts a honest-to-god asshole with few redeeming qualities; the movie Barry is definitely a criminal, but he's the fun-loving adventurous kind who makes bad decisions, the sort of criminal you can root for. I get why the movie does this - the alternative is going full Black Mass and having your movie just, like, not be fun to watch - but at the same time, movies like this one and The Polka King, which fail to explore why these sorts of guys feel so fucking entitled, always feel like a bit of a misfire.

That having been said, it's still amazingly good at what it does (far moreso than The Polka King) - a stylishly directed, visually engaging caper flick with plenty of funny bits, some very exciting action sequences, and a pretty impressively dark worldview that doesn't overstay its welcome. It's a really fine piece of entertainment; the only problem is that occasionally it thinks it's something more than that, and it isn't.

Truth: I had never watched this until Burt Reynolds died. Sometimes you just don't get around to stuff in time, you know?

Anyways, this one mostly gets by on charm, because it has to. I estimated that about fifteen to twenty minutes of its runtime are just driving montage scenes set to "Eastbound and Down" - and not even chase scenes for the most part. The editing is also pretty scattershot and even half a glance's worth of attention will have you noticing continuity gaps from shot-to-shot, and by the end you'll realize they were using different shots from different sequences to try and make the thing flow better (the status of Buford T. Justice's car is usually what gives it away, although sometimes it's whether Bandit or Carrie is driving the Trans Am).

But it's a pleasant diversion, is the thing, a throwback to when films could cheerfully present cops as foolish bullies without Fox News throwing a hissy that we weren't respecting Our Brave Heroes enough. (Granted, it's also an exercise in white privilege that Bandit gets to be a happy-go-lucky hero idolized by all and sundry, but that's a long essay I'm not going to get into here.) Reynolds was never more cool, Sally Field is adorable, Jerry Reed is a fun sidekick (and gets a great sequence wherein the moral might as well be "being the sidekick isn't as fun" - a very meta, 70s thing to throw into the movie) and Jackie Gleason completely irredeemable as the baddie (in a character sense I mean; in an actorly sense, he's hamming it up large).

It's never less than pleasant. On the other hand, it's rarely anything more than that. Still, sometimes that's enough.

As a basketball fan, I appreciate all the little details they totally fucked up on purpose to create an enjoyably stupid comedy: enjoying the fact that there once was a team called the Anaheim Amigos, because that's a funny name, but ignoring that they were the Los Angeles Stars when the ABA folded, for example, or skipping the bit where the alley-oop was actually invented in the 1950s.

This remains my favorite of Will Ferrell's comedies (not the one I think is best, but my favorite) for that reason. I will be the first to admit that the movie mostly tries to skate by on the charm/smarm of its cast rather than on comedic genius, but I think it mostly succeeds (boring Woody Harrelson/Maura Tierney romantic subplot aside).

Plus, it has some great jokes about being mauled to death by a bear, and we need more of that in cinema.

Spectral was a Netflix purchase rather than a Netflix original production, but either way, it's got that same sort of "not quite bad, not quite good" feel that so many Netflix Originals (tm) that aren't obviously indie film festival pickups have.

Visually it's a treat (even if it's deeply inconsistent in how it warps halfway through from being shot like a gritty, realistic war epic to being shot like a sci-fi gangbuster), and the action is mostly pretty exciting, but in terms of narrative it's just sort of dull and silly, not feeling like a story but rather a series of events that happen in a row. No real identifiable characters beyond the two leads, either.

There's a lot worse on Netflix (including a bunch of things Netflix didn't make!) but there's enough that's better (including stuff Netflix did make!) that this is definitely not a first choice in any regard.

What Searching reminds me of, oddly enough, is the very first episode of Sherlock. Not because they have anything in common in terms of story or character - they don't, beyond both being mystery/thrillers - but because you might have forgotten that, in that first episode of Sherlock, Stephen Moffat invented new cinematic language when, in order to depict characters texting, he simply superimposed the texts on the screen like subtitles. That's where it started, that bit of cinematic language that's become ubiquitous because it works so well - before then everybody simply showed characters fiddling with their phones and filmed the actual message on the phone, which works all right - but Moffat's way is better because it lets the filmmaker depict the character and their texts at the same time. It's a better way to use texting in a visual medium, and in that small but significant way it changed the game.

In Searching, Aneesh Chaganty does much the same thing, except instead of texting it is basically all of the internet and computers this time, making a bold visual storytelling statement: we are so familiar with computers at this point that we can understand, easily enough, how search windows and web pages work - for real, not some made-up Hollywood versions of these things - and use them to tell stories, create character beats, work in moment-to-moment tension. It's a must-see for anybody who wants to know how screen-time is going to be visualized in movies going forward, because this is how it's going to work now - which means "it's going to work so much better."

On top of its instant historical importance, though, it's also a superb thriller, perfectly paced and executed using humour to diffuse tension just long enough until it hits you with dramatic revelations ten times as hard. John Cho is, unsurprisingly, superb (this is the third year in a row where he's going to end up in a film I consider one of the ten best of the year) and carries the movie on his back.

Most people who know Disney kinda well know that Fun and Fancy Free is notable for being the first appearance of "Mickey and the Beanstalk," and the last time Walt Disney voiced Mickey Mouse. And yes, "Mickey and the Beanstalk" is a pretty good short - in the version you're probably used to, which cuts out all of the live-action sequences featuring Edgar Bergen and his dummies, Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd, and most of the voiceover narration by Bergen, because almost all of that is painful to watch and listen to.

(Bergen did some of his best work "partnering" with McCarthy, but the two of them worked best when Bergen was allowed to let McCarthy be truly mean and spiteful, and this G-rated fluff doesn't get anywhere near that.)

As for the first short, "Bongo" is fucking dogshit, rightfully relegated to the dusty annals of Disney history, with Dinah Shore's dull narration failing to enliven a boring and not terribly visually appealing cartoon. Also, in between the two, you get a bunch of charmless segues courtesy of Jiminy Cricket.

The thing about Happy Madison films on Netflix is that there is an active subculture of people who just want to hate them. This is understandable. Most Happy Madison films fall somewhere on a spectrum of "total shit" to "mediocre and underachieving." But they don't have to be this way.

The reason I am saying this is because, for the first fifteen or so minutes of its runtime, Father of the Year is reasonably fun. It's not an award-winner or a critical darling or anything, but it starts out feeling like a broad but amiable coming-of-age comedy. David Spade's performance as the titular dad isn't especially brilliant, but Spade's been doing variations on the affable hick loser character for so long that he wears it like a comfortable second skin at this point. Nate Faxon is doing what he always does, and he does it well. And the younger actors are mostly pretty charming, and Joey Bragg and Brigit Mendler have good chemistry. For those first ten or fifteen minutes, I was genuinely thinking "...shit, could this actually be decent?"

But then they start repeating jokes. And then the plot doesn't really go anywhere. And they repeat more jokes, and it bears saying that these were not inspired jokes to begin with. Spade's performance gets broader and broader as the movie progresses, to the point where, by the end, he is shrieking in shock and unable to comprehend a pair of virtual reality glasses like some sort of weird caveman who doesn't understand technology that has literally existed in common pop culture for thirty years. And the plot still doesn't go anywhere.

And eventually, you're at a point where all the low-key charm in the world isn't enough for you to forgive it its numerous flaws, and it's because - like most Happy Madison films - it's just an exercise in laziness, where the big names show up to get their paycheque fuck-money. Really, the only way Father of the Year differs from the far worse Ridiculous 6 is that here, you can see how it could have been a good movie and failed, whereas Ridiculous 6 was always gonna be bad no matter what. But that doesn't earn this one a whole lot of extra points.

Out of left-field comes this pleasant surprise, a high school dramedy with some romcom elements to it and a good sense of the absurdity of its setting (high school debate club), but also a willingness to transcend that and explore parent-child relationships more fully than a lot of high school comedies do, and even sorta-question the entire purpose of high school.

(The movie's great flaw, incidentally, is that it doesn't challenge the poor kids' argument in the debate about why college isn't worth it, instead conceding the rhetorical ground to them because the poor kids were the ones in this movie who Bucked The System and the protagonists need to give them praise to demonstrate their growth - but the poor kids' argument is still wrong.)

Jacob Latimore and Sami Gayle play high school nerds extremely well (and the movie earns a lot of points for not trying to make them transcend their particular type of nerd-dom, but instead lets them lean into it) and their romance never feels forced or unrealistic. Christina Hendricks is good in everything and she is good in this. Uzo Aduba is good in everything and she is good in this too. AND HELEN FUCKIN' HUNT IS IN THIS MOVIE! HELEN FUCKIN' HUNT! (Seriously, why have you not immediately stopped reading here and gone off to watch it upon learning that Helen Hunt is in the movie?)

Not perfect - the Hendricks/Aduba feud subplot seems sometimes a little extraneous to the movie as a whole, for one thing - but really quite entertaining and sweet.

Yes, it essentially defined heist-movie filmmaking for the rest of time, and yes, I always love a movie that creates and expands film language all by itself, and yes, that 32-minute speechless, unscored heist sequence is a thing of glory, and yes, the police were angry because they thought the film was essentially a learning seminar for potential thieves, but you've read all that elsewhere if you've ever read anything about Rififi. So treat it as said.

Really, what gets me is how goddamn French this whole movie is, because the movie is defined by flawed characters who are brought down by their flaws, and because the movie is willing to take those odd, occasional detours that it feels the need to take (why spend time on a shot of a child's stray balloon? Why not), and because it's got that willingness to go dark and if the audience doesn't like it, well, fuck 'em. That's French filmmaking right to the bone and I love it to death.

And Jean Servais' turn as Tony is the sort of thing people might call "hot fire" in the way we all refer to quality things as that now - except it's not. It's smoldering, deliberate anger and exhaustion, and it's very much a rarity even for antiheroic characters like his.

Other than admiring how Logan Marshall-Green incorporates his acting skill into his movements to make you see when it's his character in control of his body and when it clearly isn't, I don't have that much to say about this movie? It's just a really good indie sci-fi flick with a touch of body horror.

"Indie," of course, means that there are a few caveats. Every so often a bit of dialogue falls flat. Some of the acting is... less than ideal at times (money can't buy everything, but it sure can buy acting talent - there's a reason shitty movies like Assassin's Creed shell out for Jeremy Irons and Brendan Gleeson, they can make shit dialogue and stupid plot seem at least momentarily reasonable). You can occasionally see where the budget ran out - sure are a lot of older cars on the streets in this near-future story where self-driving automated cars are a big deal - and most of the film's gore is really kind of needless and feels like somebody at Blumhouse couldn't get away from their shitty indie-horror roots which permeate half of the films they produce.

But these are quibbles of the sort where you discuss why the film is an A-minus rather than an A. It's mostly smart, fun, visceral filmmaking, and worth seeking out.

There are sparks of a really good idea and a really good movie here: Kyle Harvey and Shelley Hennig have remarkably great chemistry together, more of the jokes hit than not, and the underground rap scene is a fertile setting for a movie to really make its mark.

Unfortunately, though, the movie never really rises above being anything more than tolerable. In large part this is because Harrison Holzer's performance as the best friend/manager is actively grating and unpleasant to watch, and not in a "we wanted to make the viewer uncomfortable" sort of way but more just that he's so, so, so annoying that any comic aspect of the character gets lost because you want to strangle him every second he's on screen. But beyond that, when I say more of the jokes hit than not, that also means a significant minority of them simply don't land: everything with the Bl'asia subplot feels exceptionally forced in a "studio higher-up had notes" sort of a way.

Worst-case scenario, this is the sort of mid-tier popular fare that might be actively forgettable but also isn't outright bad. There's an audience for this, and I'm glad Netflix is supplying this sort of movie again; I just wish that they were making ones that were, oh, 33% better than what they're mostly giving us.

While I was watching this movie I kept thinking "it's not straight-up bad, but man, this really feels like a first draft that nobody went back to revise" and then I got to the end and saw Max Landis wrote it and went ohhhhhhhhhhh okay.

There are a lot of funny lines in it, and a lot of fun performances - some of them exceptionally fun - but all of it comes across as relatively empty. Snarky fourth-wall breaking (and this movie has so much fourth-wall breaking it barely seems to engage in its own universe for any length of time) is fine and all, but it's really only useful in pursuit of a larger truth. Which is to say: Deadpool was more profound in its use of the fourth wall than this was.

It mostly comes across as relentlessly glib - by which I mean it uses its cleverness to dodge the troubling questions it poses rather than seek out answers to them - and the third-act turn where Doug Kenney can't escape his own depression just feels unearned as a result. I really wanted to like this one so much more than I did, and I cannot call it bad because there is a lot that is fun, and the ending is sweet. But it's unfocused, terribly so, and it feels like a collection of scenes far more than it feels like a movie.

Tom Hanks gives a lovely performance, Tom Tykwer can't help but shoot gorgeous shots, and it's all sorta pointless because there's no spine to this movie worth mentioning, no "what is this about" beyond the series of events which happens over the course of the film, no sense of connection to any narrative at all.

Like, it's not an unpleasant viewing experience at all! Tom Hanks acts as well as he can, which is very well, and he's in beautiful-looking scenes, and each individual scene is engaging, in its way. But at the end, you will be hardpressed to remember anything from the beginning ten minutes of the film; that is how inessential the entire enterprise is.

It's aged surprisingly well for something that was, let's be honest, kind of a cheeseball artifact when it was first made; Sam Raimi indulges all his live-action-cartoon preferences in this movie, both in performance and in action direction, and that doesn't make it bad so much as amazingly over-the-top at times in a way which preserves it where a straightforward superhero action movie of the era would feel dated now.

Aside: anybody who tells you that Liam Neeson gives Darkman a "soulful inner life" or whatever when he literally has a scene where he dances around with a tinfoil hat on his head sing-screaming "I'm the freak, I'm the freak" though, those people are full of crap. Neeson's going full B-movie here, so is Frances McDormand and everybody else in this, and it's honestly pretty fun to watch. This isn't a movie with emotional layers, it's a movie where Liam Neeson runs cartoon-roadrunner-style across the top of a moving truck after a helicopter chase that would make Tom Cruise nod his head approvingly, and that is fine.

Jack Black is honestly a tour de force in this, and Jenny Slate, Jacki Weaver, JB Smoove and Jason Schwartzman are all having a great time with this "I can't believe it's a true story" sort of movie.

Here is the problem: it is eminently believable, and I do not mean that as a compliment. It's reasonably true to the real-life facts of Jan Lewan's actual swindle, but it omits all sorts of things - like how Ewan operated his swindle by routinely touring Poland and bringing his marks along with him (which was a key part of his pitch) - and worse, it deliberately veers away from the fact that Lewan was actually pretty successful in his polka career, and the reason he got caught isn't because people cottoned on to the fact that he was in fact a loser with money, but because Ponzi schemes inevitably collapse and he was going to get caught eventually no matter how long he managed to keep it going, which in his case was a remarkably long time (in between twenty and twenty-five years). I mean, the dude ended up owing people five million dollars at the end. You don't get to five million dollars owing unless you're a master grifter.

I get that they want to push Black's interpretation of the character as a classic loser - it makes him a lot more sympathetic, instead of the real-life sociopath Lewan almost certainly is - but it significantly deadens a story that in real life was genuinely insane. Tack on extremely erratic pacing, a subplot for Slate's Marla Lewan about her pageant competition that sucks the life out of the film just when it needs to be mounting up, and you get a film that isn't half as good as it could have been. It's still entertaining in its way - there are so many worse Netflix Originals out there - but when you see something and you can see exactly how it could have been significantly better, that's an issue.

Okay, so we're sure Noah Centineo isn't Mark Ruffalo's secret bastard son, right? We're absolutely sure that Mark Ruffalo, years and years ago, did not go around spreading his Ruffalo DNA in such a manner as to result in a young Mark Ruffalo equivalent appearing and also becoming an actor? We're sure this couldn't have happened?

Anyway, if you can get past the Mark Ruffalo conspiracy theories, such as the perfectly plausible suggestion that Noah Centineo is in fact a clone duplicate of Mark Ruffalo who escaped from a lab before Ruffalo Prime could harvest him for precious organs and now lives under a shield of plausible deniability, this is a pretty sweet, small-scale romantic high school dramedy that feels very real and lived-in, naturalistic without being mumblecore, amusing without being glib. It's pleasant, with a wonderful selection of actors doing very good work, with an Asian-American lead whose race is not commented on once during the entire film because the film understands it doesn't have to do that, and that is worth a great deal.

(much like Noah Centineo's organs are worth a great deal to Mark Ruffalo)

A pretty straightforward combination of a survival movie with a "bonding with animal" movie, plus it is that rare entry into the "caveman" genre of film which, by virtue of its rarity, makes it reasonably novel. (I mean, we haven't had a caveman movie since... 10,000 BC? And that was a decade ago. Also it was terrible.)

And... it's pretty good, all things considered. There are more than a few story cheats re: the capability of Cro-Magnon hunters of the period (Keda seems terribly adept at medical procedures which seem unlikely for someone his age to have known, for example), but these are mostly minor enough that it doesn't really impede your belief in the film's narrative, which is "a kid and a wolf become friends and this is how dogs happened."

The acting is, likewise, nothing groundbreaking but it's good enough, which means it too does not get in your way of enjoying the film, and it's easy to enjoy because Chuck the dog is a great movie wolf, the story is engaging without being condescending or hyperbolic, and because this is probably the most beautifully shot film of the year so far - if you want breathtaking majestic vista after breathtaking majestic vista, yes, this is the movie you should go see. (Especially if you can catch it in IMAX.)

Look, maybe it gets watchable after the first twenty-five minutes, but when something marketed as a comedy doesn't make me laugh, snigger or even think "huh, that was clever" once in the first twenty-five minutes, I don't care: you bombed, completely and utterly, with your charmless boring waste of celluloid.

A stunning misfire, which is a shame because there's the bones of a decent enough girls-go-rough comedy a la Girls Trip or The Sweetest Thing in there, and just enough good jokes that they knew this to be the case, but:

- literally fifteen minutes of this 94-minute film is simply the characters dancing to EDM and various scenes of club action, which is extravagant and wasteful in the extreme

- Vanessa Bayer and Phoebe Robinson get some good jokes, but their characters are massively unlikeable on practically every level

- Gillian Jacobs and Richard Madden have excellent chemistry, but the plot forces them together in a way that feels forced and unnatural

- the lengthy series of disreputable Spaniards in this film feels vaguely bigoted

- way, way too many instances of a character saying "this is obviously an unwise thing for us to be doing" and then they do it anyway and nothing bad happens

- the conclusion completely makes all of the tension for Jacobs' character which has been propelling the whole movie, such as it has done, utterly worthless; it undoes the film completely and makes most of the plot pointless

Just... wow. Everybody in the film deserves to be in a better one, and that's all that can really be said for it.

There is a moment in Crazy Rich Asians - you'll know it when you see it - that is visually beautiful and sentimental and touching, while also being over-the-top and ridiculous and hilarious. It's stupid, but it's stupid on purpose, and it's the sort of stupid given to you by a cast and crew who understand that stupid can also be heartfelt and meaningful even though it's still really goddamn stupid. That's a really hard thing to communicate wordlessly, which this film does, and when I saw it, I knew this one was an all-timer.

What I am saying is that it's outstanding, a success on every level a film like this can succeed (and anybody condemning it for sticking with a crowd-pleasing story should just go jerk off to a Harmony Korine film and leave the rest of us alone); instantly one of the best films of the year and I'm not sure how far back I'd have to go to think of a classically-styled romcom that comes close to matching it. It's visually rich, perfectly paced, constantly entertaining (by which I mean: it's really, really fucking funny) and never anything less than completely involving, with a passel of performances that deserve to be starmakers.

Constance Wu has 1990 Julia Roberts-level light-up-the-room charm but with acting chops that far exceed what Roberts had developed when she made Pretty Woman; Henry Golding has perfect chemistry with her and a natural sense of screen grace that few actors ever manage and holy shit this is his first movie. Michelle Yeoh is stunning, because of course she fucking is, and she communicates the difficulties her character has lived with every gesture and spoken word. And then there's a heap more excellent work from, oh god, Awkwafina and Ken Jeong and Gemma Chan and Colin Pang and Lisa Lu and Nick Santos and Ronny Chieng and Calvin Loon and I could just keep going, I really could.

Deserves multiple viewings, which will be ridiculously enjoyable. Jon M. Chu deserves all the money.

It's interesting if somewhat mistitled, because calling it Borg (And Also McEnroe) would probably have been far more on the nose. This isn't a movie about dueling storylines, it's about Bjorn Borg's inner struggle. (And indeed, the Swedish title is simply Borg, so... yeah.)

That struggle is relatively one-note as plotlines go ("see, Borg looks like he's emotionless, but really, he has lots of emotions") and there isn't a lot of great dialogue, so really, the movie comes down to execution more than anything else, and on that front it mostly succeeds. Some incredibly smart shot choices, washed-out post-colouring that really makes the film feel like faded photographs from the early 80s, wise editing choices (this is a movie which frequently chooses to linger, and the lingering mostly doesn't outstay its welcome), excellent performances by Sverrir Gudnason and Shia LaBeefs as the leads, a couple of good supporting turns from Stellan Skarsgard and Tuva Novotny, and a good minimalist score all serve to elevate a mostly nonexistent script with no real inherent tension.

It's just good enough to be good. Maybe a better starting point would have made it great.

(Counting this as a fresh watch since I haven't seen it in twenty-plus years and couldn't remember anything beyond the No Man's Land rush scene.)

Has all of Kubrick's genius for staging a shot and all of his humanity rising through the cool mountains of human indifference that are in all of his best films. The No Man's Land rush scene is one of the best war sequences ever put to film, but then after that he's still got another hour of men being emotionally tortured, and his skill is such that this never lags, or becomes too arduous to continue to watch, or its moral too piercing and lecturing (not that this was likely, given that malicious institutional failure isn't really something Hollywood does a lot of).

I only go half a star below five because I think Kirk Douglas isn't really right for the lead role; in a film where everybody else disappears into their roles, he sort of juts out and reminds you it's a movie. Everybody else is naturalistic, and he's Kirk fucking Douglas. It's not his fault and his performance is very good, but he's still Kirk Douglas.

Kevin James is perhaps the least aggravating of the Happy Madison stable these days, mostly because unlike most of them he really does seem to give a fuck that the movies he makes be the product of actual effort. I mean, we all mock Paul Blart: Mall Cop and Zookeeper but James is willing to do really painful pratfalls in those flicks, because he really does seem to give a shit. Granted, that doesn't make those movies - or this one - good. But they're at least tolerable in a way that the Ridiculous Sixes and Fathers of the Year are never going to be.

Anyway, "tolerable" is about where this one checks out, with a plot that is far too convoluted for a story this silly and doesn't have the courage to follow through on what should be its core premise (most of us would get killed if we had to be action heroes), right up to letting Kevin James, who is a fat dude in his fifties, do for-real action hero stuff in the film's climax. It feels like the worst kind of wish fulfillment rather than an actual story, and that's a shame because James is a genuinely engaging screen presence, and Zulay Henao is a great buttkicker/love interest, and Andy Garcia looks like he's having a blast, as does Kim Coates. Everybody in this movie clearly wanted people to enjoy this movie, and that sucks, because this isn't a very enjoyable or memorable film.

(oh, god, if I commit to watching every Netflix Original I have like half a dozen Happy Madison originals to go)

And sure, it's a neat idea, but it is so motherfucking convoluted. "What if humans created artificial life, then decided to wipe out artificial life because they got scared of it, but lost the war and fled to Mars, and then the androids decided to mostly wipe their memories of the war and forget that they're androids because they could do that because they're computer brains, but then one day the humans come back" is a fuck of an elevator pitch, you have to admit.

And beyond that pitch, what is there to this movie? Ten minutes of premonition/scene-setting, then the humans (who you initially think are aliens, of course) show up and start killing everybody, and then it's a chase scene interrupted by a series of flashbacks which contextualize the flashbacks (which we thought were flash-forwards) Michael Pena has been having all movie, and then more chase scene. It barely has a plot. It has shooting and expository speeches in between the shooting.

Tack on some truly horrendous lighting and editing choices which make the action extremely hard to follow and you've got a recipe for the sort of bad movie which is certainly bad, but also the sort of bad movie where you can see where it might have been good at some point before everything went to shit.

]]>Christopher Bird2018, rankedhttps://letterboxd.com/mightygodking/list/2018-ranked/ letterboxd-list-2831045Tue, 24 Jul 2018 17:52:57 +1200everything from this year I have seen so far this year, but with rankings, like we do

(treating films wide-released in North America in 2018, but which may have had international or festival releases in 2017, as 2018 releases for the purpose of the list)

]]>Christopher Bird"Netflix Originals," rankedhttps://letterboxd.com/mightygodking/list/netflix-originals-ranked/ letterboxd-list-2866667Fri, 3 Aug 2018 17:55:32 +1200whether they're actual productions financed by Netflix, indie productions which sold the lifetime rights to Netflix, or studio movies that studios bailed on and sold to Netflix cheaply, I will rank them all

the current absolute minimum cutoff for "worth watching" is Psychokinesis (#16); everything below that you should avoid unless you really, really want to see a specific kind of bad movie